2020 is here and what worked in the past to grow your website traffic isn’t going to work in the future. There are too many blogs, too many videos, and too many podcasts all vying for our attention, and in the new year the intensity is going to increase.

We’re all going to have to adapt with the changing times in order to keep up. Here are five strategies to grow your site’s traffic in the upcoming year.

1. Keyword Focused Articles

Smart companies will create a content plan that includes keyword focused articles. In other words, you want to create articles that solves a pain that your customers are searching for month after month. For instance, runners and joggers constantly face the real pain of shin splints. If you are a sneaker store, then an article about “the best shoes to cure shin splints” might prove to drive traffic to your site in perpetuity.

2. Create Free Tools

Free tools are traffic magnets. Ebooks, reports and simple pdfs are a thing of the past. If you want someone to opt-in to your email list or engage with your website, create a tools people can use. Checklists, calculators, planners, templates, etc. Bloggers love to link to them and share them with their audience. For instance, a cool free tool that I just came across today is a logo maker from the company logomyway. With this tool, you can create a free logo for your company using one of their templates. While the logo maker probably cost a bit of money to build, they are getting a lot of traffic and engagement. If you don’t have the money to build a tool you can also create a free one using something like a simple spreadsheet.

Time Doctor created a timesheet template which is simply a Google Sheet that allows business owners to easily record their freelancers hours worked and calculate how much they need to pay them. It drives tens of thousands of visitors every month.

3. Create Content Partnerships

A few years ago, I ran into a blog post called “How to Create Viral Content: 10 Insights from 100 Million Articles” on the blog OKDork.com. I am a loyal reader of OKDork, so when this article hit my inbox, I was excited to read it.

And this was the first time I ever came across a content partnership. At the time, a little-known company called BuzzSumo was trying to get off the ground. They are a content marketing company that allows marketers to find content that performs best. They have tons of data on what makes content successful and they are widely known now.

BuzzSumo partnered with OKDork to share some of their amazing data and created an in depth article about what makes a blog post go viral. Look for potential ways to partner with other content creators to gain further reach.

4. Content Multipliers

One of the great challenges a content marketer faces is constantly creating new content. There’s always a need to feed the beast. However, one trend I’ve been seeing over the past 18 months and expect it to increase is to multiply current content.

For instance, can you turn that blog post into a podcast, YouTube video, a dozen Tweets and a Instagram Story? Or how about syndicate the blog post on a popular site in your industry and republish it to medium.com and LinkedIn? Lumen5 will take your blog post and turn it into a video.

Taking your content and turning it into new forms for consumption will allow you to increase the reach of each piece you create. In 2020, there will be less creation, and more distribution.

5. Personalized Blogger Outreach

Right now, most blogger outreach consists of marketers creating a template, loading it into an outreach software, and firing it off to hundreds or thousands of bloggers. I can’t tell you how many times a day I get the same exact outreach template over and over again.

The most popular bloggers are rapidly developing an immunity to canned outreach templates.

However, the marketers that are succeeding with outreach are doing so with highly personalized emails. They are doing research and learning who they’re reaching out to BEFORE hitting send. That way they can customize each and every single email that they send out. I’m also noticing personalized channel outreach. If you have a blogger that is very active on Twitter, engage with them there. Email isn’t the only way to create a relationship.

Is this a lot of work? You bet! But, it is the only way to catch the attention of the most popular bloggers in your industry.

The content marketing landscape is rapidly changing. As we exit the 2010’s and move into the 2020’s, it’s going to become much more competitive to get your content seen and traffic to your website. Tap into these five strategies to get ahead of the curve.

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At SuccessValley, our focus is on cultivating and sustaining a Network Community for students and aspiring entrepreneurs to come and explore the latest resources and developmental tools while building positive, growth-oriented relationships through our networking opportunities. Our guiding principals are teamwork, knowledge sharing, and creating successful partnerships.